ELEKTRO
Elektro the Westinghouse Robot
I just finished teaching a course on robotics and am very interested in robots (as well as 50's nostalgia of most types). Elektro was a robot that was made by Westinghouse who performed at the Westinghouse pavilion at the 1939 NY World's Fair. Quickly, he slipped out of popular culture.
Standing on a platform high above the crowds, Elektro would go through his paces under voice control of his operator, who spoke his commands into a telephone handset as a light flashed in a hole in Elektro's midriff. Elektro needed his operator to enunciate every word in a slow, stilted voice. This seemed strange, since it appeared as if Elektro could apparently understand colloquial English, but what he was really reacting to was the pattern of sounds that the operator spoke rather than the words.
You can click here to learn all about him and several of the other Westinghouse robots. You can visit the Mansfield Memorial Museum in in Ohio where you can visit to and see some of these mechanical men.
